Night of bloody havoc

There are uncanny similarities between the Gunpowder Plotters of 1605 and today's Islamic fundamentalists

Published in the Evening Standard 3 November 2005

Will the children of 2405 stand on street corners, collecting a “penny for the Osama”? Or even a “penny for the Mohammed”?

It's a dread thought, the notion of a collective hatred that could live on for four centuries. Surely, we hope, our battle with Osama Bin-Laden will have been forgotten 400 years from now. Surely the name of Mohammed
Siddique Khan, said to be the leader of the July 7 bombers, will be lost to oblivion by then.

And yet the November 5 plotters of 1605 live in on the English imagination. On Saturday, we will tell their story, with fire and flame, once more.

It's true that the memory of their deed can seem cloudy, especially as you look around the London of 2005. For one thing, November 5 itself now has a challenger on its hands. My own street in Stoke Newington came alive on Monday, not with kids looking for old clothes for an effigy of Guy Fawkes, but with children dressed as ghouls and spooks, out to trick or treat their way into the sweetie jar. Several porches were aglow with moon-faced pumpkins, their eyes bright with candlelight. A
festival that barely existed when I was a child has, thanks to the irresistible influence of American popular culture, elbowed its way into the British autumn.

Even those who will stay with tradition, eschew the Scream masks and instead ooh and aah at a fireworks display this weekend may be blithely unaware of the event whose 400th anniversary they will be commemorating. Plenty of them won't even call it Guy Fawkes Night. It will simply be Bonfire Night.

And yet the history we are marking is hardly remote or obscure. It is about an act of political violence plotted by a cell of extremists, determined to unleash bloody havoc in London – and all in the name of God. And that, as we saw with our own eyes in July, is anything but academic.

Of course there are big differences between the Catholic conspirators of 1605, determined to strike out at Protestant oppression, and the jihadists of today. Few Muslims would claim to be persecuted for their faith in 21st century Britain. They may experience daily prejudice and exclusion, but they do not face a state assault that has driven their religion underground.

Nor have Muslims declared war, as a community, on the British state: for all the talk of a clash of civilisations, there has been no Islamic equivalent of Pope Pius V’s 1570 bull against Elizabeth I. That document called on all Catholics “to take up against her the weapons of justice.” Osama Bin-Laden issues similar demands every day – but he is a fringe fanatic, not the sovereign leader of his faith.

In other words, the temperature was higher in the war between Catholics and Protestants in 1605 than it is between the west and Islam today. And yet the awkward parallels remain. Today’s Muslims do feel they are on the receiving end of a hostile onslaught – not in the towns and cities of Britain, but in Iraq, Afghanistan and beyond. Yesterday I called up historian Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose book Reformation charts the religious wars that divided Europe. He said today’s Muslims and the Catholics of the early 17th century had much in common – starting with a deep “well of anger.”

The perpetrators of the July bombings would certainly recognise themselves in the Gunpowder plotters. They too, says MacCulloch, were “highly motivated, highly educated men who felt thwarted by the society they lived in.” Then the terrorists had names like Catesby, Winter and Percy. Now it is Khan, Hussain and Tanweer.

The methods of attack have something in common, too. Many are struck by the apparent nihilism of contemporary Islamist terror, hitting out at random civilians whose deaths cannot possibly wound those in power. Guy Fawkes’ attack seems to make more sense: attempting to blow up the centre of political authority, parliament itself. And yet that operation, had it come off, might have proved no less futile than modern-day terror. The November 5 plotters had no follow-up plan; there was no foreign Catholic army, poised to invade England the moment Westminster was in flames. Their ‘spectacular’ would have caused bloodshed and anarchy, but it would not, most historians agree, have led automatically to a Catholic takeover.

There are other, almost eerie similarities. Britain’s Catholics reacted to 5/11 the way British Muslims responded to 7/7. Most swiftly repudiated it, anxious not to deepen the hostility against them any further. Some went into denial, claiming that Catholics were blameless and that the gunpowder plot was really a Protestant conspiracy, deliberately encouraged by the Earl of Salisbury to justify a royal crackdown against Catholics. Updated for today, think of the radical Islamist websites claiming 9/11 was the handiwork of Washington or the Mossad, a cunning trick to justify a war against Muslims.

Arguments about the history rage on – plenty of Catholics are convinced of Cecil’s villainy to this day – but there is more at stake here than an amusing then-and-now parlour game. For this is an event deeply rooted in our national culture which may just have something to tell us now.

In the end, that conflict, one that seemed to threaten the very foundations of the country, passed. King James, in the language of today’s politics, reached out to Catholic moderates and sought to shrink the pool of grievance in which the extremists swam. That must be a lesson for today.

In 2005 Catholics are as much a part of the British landscape as anyone else – they are no longer seen as foreign, let alone an enemy within. Even Bonfire Night has lost its anti-Catholic edge. Let that be the aim for Britain and the Muslim world, that one day the very idea of a clash will look as strange and distant as the war between Catholics and Protestants seems now. And this time, let’s not wait 400 years.

Posted on November 3, 2005 07:46 PM

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